Americans should keep that in mind when they listen to politicians yakking away about the financial mess that has boiled over on Wall Street.
Both Obama and McCain are playing the populist card, saying that the trouble is rooted in capitalism. By gosh, we’d better have more government regulation to keep all those greedy financial types from ripping the little guy off!
The truth of the matter is that this is all the inevitable result of decades of government tampering with the financial markets, as Sheldon Richman explains here.
The fact that the candidates have taken the low road of populist demagoguery rather than explaining what has actually happened and then making a statement on how they propose to deal with these and other looming financial problems indicates that either a) they’re completely in the dark themselves or b) they calculate that they’re better off electorally by assuming that most voters (as Jack Nicholson’s character said in A Few Good Men) “can’t handle the truth.”
Both of those explanations are troubling.
